Last weekend, I tried my hand at night photography again since a lot of years, taking advantage of a cloudless night with little moonlight.
The thing is, I had never processed this type of photo in DT before, and although I don’t think it went badly overall (apart from the fact that I shot with too long exposure time and the stars came out a little blurry), I didn’t manage to handle the sky’s dominant colours very well, among other things.
So here’s an example from the other day to see what you can get out of it.
I would appreciate any advice you can give me about noise reduction, hot pixels, sharpening, color correction, etc. I already have a clearer idea that next time I will try to do multiple exposures to get more dynamic range between the sky and the Earth, as well as trying to use speeds around 18-20 seconds instead of 30.
I’m using an app called Photopills because it is really useful for locating the Milky Way among other things such as hyperfocal distance, etc.
My camera is a Sony A7II and the lens is a Tamron 24 2.8.
The photo was taken up on the mountain, and what you can see in the background is the Mediterranean Sea.
I turned the strength of the hot pixels up high because there was a hot pixel in the bottom left foreground that was persistent. I used incandescent WB in the color calibration module. I added blue saturation to the image. I used the tone equalizer with a drawn mask to brighten the foreground detail. S_DSC2650.ARW.xmp (15.6 KB)
Noise reduction I’ve set denoise profiled to chroma only to keep details, also I restricted the sharpening of diffuse and sharpen to avoid adding noise in the dark parts of the sky
Sharpening I used contrast equalizer on the Milky Way only
Hot pixels I’ve used the “detect by 3 neighbor” mode and lowered the threshold until hot pixels in the dark parts were gone
Highlight reconstruction I have lowered the threshold until the color bleeds around the bright stars are gone
Color correction I used rgb primaries to get the overall colors, I edited locally the Milky Way to get contrast back and colors, I removed the intense dark blue color of the sky (mostly masked instances of color equalizer and color balance rgb)
